List::MoreUtils provides some trivial but commonly needed functionality on lists which is not going to go into List::Util.

All of the below functions are implementable in only a couple of lines of Perl code. Using the functions from this module however should give slightly better performance as everything is implemented in C. The pure-Perl implementation of these functions only serves as a fallback in case the C portions of this module couldn't be compiled on this machine.

Applies BLOCK to each item in LIST and returns a list of the values after BLOCK has been applied. In scalar context, the last element is returned. This function is similar to map but will not modify the elements of the input list:

Evaluates BLOCK for each element in LIST (assigned to $_) and returns a list of the indices of those elements for which BLOCK returned a true value. This is just like grep only that it returns indices instead of values:

Evaluates BLOCK for each pair of elements in ARRAY1 and ARRAY2 and returns a new list consisting of BLOCK's return values. The two elements are set to $a and $b. Note that those two are aliases to the original value so changing them will modify the input arrays.

Creates an array iterator to return the elements of the list of arrays ARRAY1, ARRAY2 throughout ARRAYn in turn. That is, the first time it is called, it returns the first element of each array. The next time, it returns the second elements. And so on, until all elements are exhausted.

Calculates the minimum and maximum of LIST and returns a two element list with the first element being the minimum and the second the maximum. Returns the empty list if LIST was empty.

The minmax algorithm differs from a naive iteration over the list where each element is compared to two values being the so far calculated min and max value in that it only requires 3n/2 - 2 comparisons. Thus it is the most efficient possible algorithm.

However, the Perl implementation of it has some overhead simply due to the fact that there are more lines of Perl code involved. Therefore, LIST needs to be fairly big in order for minmax to win over a naive implementation. This limitation does not apply to the XS version.

When LIST_MOREUTILS_PP is set, the module will always use the pure-Perl implementation and not the XS one. This environment variable is really just there for the test-suite to force testing the Perl implementation, and possibly for reporting of bugs. I don't see any reason to use it in a production environment.

There is a problem with a bug in 5.6.x perls. It is a syntax error to write things like:

my @x = apply { s/foo/bar/ } qw{ foo bar baz };

It has to be written as either

my @x = apply { s/foo/bar/ } 'foo', 'bar', 'baz';

or

my @x = apply { s/foo/bar/ } my @dummy = qw/foo bar baz/;

Perl 5.5.x and Perl 5.8.x don't suffer from this limitation.

If you have a functionality that you could imagine being in this module, please drop me a line. This module's policy will be less strict than List::Util's when it comes to additions as it isn't a core module.

When you report bugs, it would be nice if you could additionally give me the output of your program with the environment variable LIST_MOREUTILS_PP set to a true value. That way I know where to look for the problem (in XS, pure-Perl or possibly both).

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.4 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.